TikTok is one of the most popular social media apps of today and had a big impact on how we navigate our online life and also on music.
In this dashboard I will visualize how music changed as TikTok got more popular. My corpus contains Billboard Year-End Hottest Singles from 2018 until 2022 and the most popular TikTok sounds per year. I would like to research three things:
A noteworthy example I would like to research is the song ’Running up the Hills” by Kate Bush, a song originally from the 1980’s, that was repopularized by the series Stranger Things and Tiktok, does that fit in with the overall trend?
For my datasets I have used the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of the years 2016 to 2022 for the popular songs. For the TikTok charts I have used the website https://tokboard.com and the datasets of the user Sveta151 on kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/sveta151).
For the popular songs I have used the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of each year. Each playlist contains a 100 singles, so in total my corpus contains 500 ‘popular’ songs.
For the TikTok data this is a bit more complicated. I could not find a lot of reliable sources for what sounds were the most popular per year or per month. From september 2018 to june 2021 I found the website https://tokboard.com. The 100 most popular sound were shown per month and I added all sounds that were songs to the corpus. There was no data after june 2021, so I complemented the tokboard-data with a dataset I found on kaggle by the user Sveta151 (https://www.kaggle.com/sveta151). For the previous years her data was quite similar to mine, so I complemented the years 2021 and 2022 with her playlists.
To finish it off, to get a more coherent view of TikTok and popular songs, I deleted all songs in the TikTok dataframe that were also present in the Billboard dataframe. In this way, songs that got popular on TikTok because they were already popular will not show in the visualizations.
Songs per type
We can see that the amount of songs per type is not equally distributed, with the Billboard containing 100 songs per year, every year and TikTok containing in between 76 and 357 songs per year. I have made sure that the songs are as representable as possible for each type and year, so for now I don’t forsee big problems resulting from this inequality.
Energy and Popularity in 2022
As expected we can see that the Billboard songs are more popular on average than the TikTok songs. When we look at danceability we can see the a very similar distribution for the more popular songs for the Billboard as well as the TikTok plot. But for the less popular TikTok songs, the energy seems to be higher on average.
Speechiness and tempo
For the speechiness and tempo we can see that these are pretty equally distributed among the two different types. TikTok seems to have a slightly bigger distribution, but that is mostly because TikTok has almost three times as many data points, so that can probably be attributed to that.
Conclusion. TikTok has an effect on music.